Event professionals have lived through a roller coaster over the last three years, which has included the pivot to virtual, the return of in-person events, evolving safety precautions and tightening budgets.

These professionals have delivered exemplary attendee experiences, fostering community even in uncertainty. They chased their revenue goals and embraced event data to demonstrate the business value of their hard work. But constant change can take a toll. More than a third of event planners now report anxiety and burnout.

Advancements in event technology plus old-fashioned teamwork can relieve some of the burden, streamlining event organizing to help planners enjoy and focus on their important work.

Balancing Responsibilities

Event organizers face many tasks, from identifying the perfect concept and narrowing down venues to seeking out fitting speakers and sponsors and building event websites. If you’re like most organizers, you also guide content development and marketing for events and attend to the pressing needs arising as the event date nears.

Delegating tasks to other team members — and hiring reliable vendors — can lift some of the weight off your shoulders. Set a clear purpose for your event so that decisions flow from your established goals. Encourage your team to overcommunicate and leverage event management technology that allows you to build your entire event in one place, from registration websites to sessions and post-event email communications. By syncing your whole team, you won’t have to handle every detail yourself, and you’ll have easy access to provide a steadying hand where needed.

Mastering Messaging

Once your team rallies to divide and conquer event planning responsibilities, you might still worry about attracting the right audience for your event and crafting the right messages to convert registrants into highly engaged attendees and prospects into customers.

Creating personalized messaging can feel daunting, adding another layer of anxiety leading to an event. Robust event management technology that integrates seamlessly with your customer relationship management (CRM) platform enables easier customized messaging. You can segment attendees by persona — marketers, salespeople, C-suite executives — to target messaging specific to roles. From there, use A/B testing to see which versions of your segmented messages resonate with recipients.

Creating a customized registration process can also set your team up for success. A choose-you-own-adventure registration path enables you to collect valuable insight into:

• Name pronunciation and pronouns;
• Accessibility needs;
• Reason for attending;
• Networking goals and format preferences;
• Topics of interest;
• Learning styles.

These insights enable you to further segment audiences to provide relevant pre- and post-event content and even fuel on-site personalization with session tracks and networking groups.

The right event technology empowers your team to constantly iterate on your messaging more quickly, easily and with better results.

Capturing (and Activating) the Right Event Data

The pivot to virtual events challenged the most seasoned event planners. Virtual events may have turned event planning on its head, but those events also revealed enormous data potential. From session engagement to real-time polls and attendee interaction data, virtual events offered unparalleled insights to improve event outcomes and inform future event strategy.

Robust event data can make your work as an organizer easier, but only if you can access the right data easily and leverage it to reach your event goals. Outdated technology and manual processes can stand between you and the data insights you need, especially as in-person events flourish once more.

Wearable technology is a game-changing advancement in event technology, offering the behavioral data insights planners gleaned from virtual events while fostering unique in-person networking opportunities. Wearable badges, wristbands and other accessories allow you to collect session check-ins, dwell time and lead capture for sponsors. Attendees can swap contact details through touchless exchange while you identify trends to improve future events.

Event data is exciting, but some organizers want to dive in and measure everything immediately. Start your event data journey without increasing your stress by focusing on a few goals and three to five metrics best suited to measure your progress. For example, if your team wants to drive registrations, consider monitoring:

• Event site click-through rates (CTRs), page bounce rates and form fill rates;
• Marketing email open rates and CTRs;
• Social media clicks, shares and form fills.

Bringing an event from conception to execution always poses a challenge, and agile event planners always rise to the occasion. Now, as they attempt to do more with less, planners need support to keep delivering outstanding results without burning out. Robust event technology eases the burden, enabling better delegation, more personalized attendee messaging and enhanced data activation without adding steps to a planner’s to-do list.

Don’t miss any event-related news: Sign up for our weekly e-newsletter HERE, listen to our latest podcast HERE and engage with us on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn!